Posts filed under ‘Uncategorized’

I am working with two monitors and there are 2 things that I use, one is now a standard Windows 7 feature and second is a patch to Flash that you might find useful:

1 – Moving applications / windows from one monitor to another – Now Windows 7 has a shortcut Shift-Win-Left and Shift-Win-Right that will move selected application from one monitor to another. Before I had to use an external app to do this. Very useful!

2 – I am often using my 2nd monitor to watch flash-based video. The annoying thing about it is that Flash won’t keep on full screen, as it react to a click outside of the screen and closes the full screen. Well, there is a patch to Flash, that allows you to watch full screen Flash on the second monitor, while working / browsing on the second. It works for Google Chrome as well! Go download it here.

There’s finally an easy way to install Rails with Ruby 1.9 using the recently released RubyInstaller (Release Candidate). RubyInstaller uses MinGW (Windows port of GCC compiler) to create binaries and provides better compatibility with the Windows environment. You can get more info and download it here.

This marks the end of Ruby’s OneClickInstaller that majority of people used to install Ruby.

A: The binary packages for Windows found on ruby-lang.org lack several key components, such as OpenSSL, Zlib and Readline, which results in a broken experience for users trying install these binary distributions out-of-the-box. To compound the issue, other extensions are built-in, but lack essential bindings such as Tk and gdbm. Locating and installing the correct versions of these missing components can be tricky; RubyInstaller seeks to alleviate these difficulties and make the installation process dead-simple by providing everything you need to get started in one straightforward installation package.

Q: If I install both versions, is there some graceful way of selecting which version is active at a given time (e.g., which ruby.exe is invoked, which irb.bat is called, etc.)?

If you haven’t been actively using script/console – you should start it now. It allows you to test things out in the environment of your project with a direct feedback. So, if you want to check those quirky database queries or how a new plugin works, run the script/console and start coding.

However, as seemingly everything in Ruby Rails, the console is a bit buggy in Windows. This calls for a console upgrade. At the same time we will include some further improvements as well to make your console the best firend.

1. Buggy cursor. Try it for yourself – type a very long line of code and try to move cursor – chances are it will get screwed up at some point in time – the cursor will jump, etc. The problems is with a module called readline. It’s a part of Ruby and was not updated from 2005, and nobody bothered to fix it for Windows. So, the only option is simply to disable it in your irb.bat file by adding the –noreadline switch like that:

Rails 2.3.5 is out. It provides a better Ruby 1.9 compatibility, you will now not need to escape everything with h() if you install a RailsXss plugin – I think this is great, and now the Nokogiri XML parser can be used.